Now, a study shows that Beijing’s campaign has successfully netted a different target: actual rumors.

According to a report published Monday by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, China’s censors have routinely deleted from Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging app “posts which contained outright falsehoods, tabloid gossip, and sensationalism—a number of which appear fairly harmless.”

“This may be a reflection of the ongoing ‘anti-rumor campaign’ sweeping Chinese social media,” Jason Q. Ng, a research fellow with the Citizen Lab, said in the report. He added that the results “remind us that Chinese Internet censorship is neither monolithic in tactics nor outcome.”

Along with the rest of China’s social-media platforms, WeChat has long been known to wipe from the Web posts containing references to politically sensitive topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown or the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement.

Less-scrutinized have been Chinese censors’ efforts to scrub away actual misinformation. The Citizen Lab report, which analyzed tens of thousands of public posts on WeChat, did not give a figure for the share such postings comprise of all censored items. But it said that of a sampling of 150 censored posts, “dozens” could be categorized as containing actual rumors, falsehoods or speculation.

A Tencent spokeswoman declined to comment on the report.

A study last month by the state-backed think tank Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that WeChat intercepts “rumors” as many as 2.1 million times a day, with researchers lamenting that the high level of trust among users makes it less likely that WeChat falsehoods will be refuted than those on other apps such as the Weibo microblogging service.

Here are a few WeChat “rumors” that caught the censors’ eye, according to the Citizen Lab report: